Tech Bytes: Three Lessons from Cyber Week Site Fails
Looking back on the 2015 edition of Cyber Week, we can reminisce on big traffic, big sales … and big fails?
Several high-profile site outages hit major retailers during a period of historically heavy online shopping. While nobody would call these positive events, they do offer retailers a few valuable lessons about the need to stay one step ahead of digital customer demand.
Not Too Big to Fail
Some of the biggest names in retail, including Walmart, Target and Neiman Marcus, experienced varying degrees of site issues at some point during Cyber Week. Leading pure play e-commerce retailer Newegg also experienced problems.
Walmart, Target and Neiman Marcus are all invested enough in technology to run their own innovation labs, and Walmart and Target have both allocated billions of dollars to e-commerce and omnichannel operations. And of course Newegg’s whole operation relies upon digital infrastructure.
Yet all these (and other) well-known retailers still had problems handling the influx of Cyber Week visitors and transactions. This goes to show that unlike Wall Street, the concept of too big to fail does not exist in the world of digital commerce.
No retailer can ever assume its size or technological sophistication makes it immune to site problems during periods of heavy demand. This brings us to the second lesson.
Be Over Prepared
For 100 years, the Boy Scouts have operated by the motto “Be Prepared.” Retailers anticipating large volumes of online and mobile shoppers for holidays and other special events need to take the early 20th century Boy Scout strategy and amp it up for the early 21st century.
No matter how much bandwidth or supporting infrastructure you think you have, assume it is not enough. In an age of elastic cloud services and massively parallel processing, backup capabilities are virtually limitless.
Make the investment and preparations to be able to stretch your capacity to handle whatever amount of digital demand comes your way. This probably will mean contracting with a third-party services provider, maybe even one with its own competitive e-commerce offering.
Nevertheless, do what is necessary to maintain constant uptime. Having adequate backup and not needing it is better than needing it and greeting holiday shoppers with an error message.
Tweet This
For retailers who experienced Cyber Week site issues, Twitter proved an especially valuable tool for monitoring and responding to consumer complaints, as well as issuing general public updates. Twitter allowed real-time conversations with irate customers and also enabled retailers to let consumers know the very latest status of site issues.
After the fact, these retailers also have a valuable trove of data that can be carefully analyzed to determine if specific factors drove the most consumer complaints (such as slow checkout vs. images not loading, etc.) and if certain keywords in corporate tweets produced a more positive response.
Social media platforms such as Twitter are new enough that retailers are still figuring out how to best use them. But as a real-time crisis management and communication tool Twitter seems hard to beat.